Vivienne Westwood by Vivienne Westwood and Ian Kelly, book review: Designer should have written the whole thing herself

Vivienne Westwood’s autobiography has been on the cards for quite a while.

An excellent 1998 book, subtitled An Unfashionable Life and written by Jane Mulvagh, started life in 1993 as autobiography – Westwood wanted Mulvagh to ghost-write it. But now, an autobiography has finally been published. Sort of. There are two authors on the cover, Westwood herself and Ian Kelly, and the book is written in the third person. Sometimes, in Kelly’s voice. It’s proposed as a “personal memoir and authorised biography,” the latter something Mulvagh’s book most decidedly was not.

In the duo-authored tome, simply titled Vivienne Westwood, there’s no explanation as to the two tones in the writing. Instead, we dive straight into recollections (Kelly’s) of a Westwood fashion show – spring/summer 2014, staged last October in Paris’s old Stock Exchange. The tone is fevered fly-on-the-wall, wide-eyed and innocent. Which is sometimes endearing, sometimes irritating. For someone purporting to report with authority from the centre of the action, Kelly’s comments seem rather out of fashion.

There is plenty of verbatim Westwood in this book, though. Great swathes, clipped irregularly by quotation marks, make up her recollections of school-life and upbringing, her crucible-eye view on the development of punk with McLaren, and her catwalk collections from the early Eighties onwards. In these, there’s the gold – the solid turns of phrase, emphatic opinion, and convoluted logic that has made her fashion so great. Plus, a unique point of view. Some of it is based on a memoir that Westwood drafted with her mentor and “intellectual personal trainer”, Gary Ness. It’s also accented with words from Westwood’s husband and co-designer Andreas Kronthaler and other members of her clique; but it is her words that matter, that say something of interest.

“Don’t talk to me now, Ian, I’m really, really busy,” is Westwood’s opening line. Which is perhaps the reason she didn’t write it solo. Kelly’s job seems to be to fill in the gaps, sketching a framework for Westwood’s words to sit within. Skilful, as you’re covering some 73 years, changes of government, social upheavals and all. But it’s largely restricted to facts, not analysis.

The opinions are left to Westwood. Those are what hold your attention and give this book its value. But it’s a slightly frustrating question of what could have been – namely, if Westwood focused her attention and penned the entire thing, in her own inimitable voice.